As people move about geographically, whether for personal or business reasons, they often want or need to stay in communication with other parties. People want the ability to receive telephone calls, even if they happen to be away from the home or office. Moreover, it is typical for a person to have more than one telephone with which he communicates. A person may have a home phone, a work phone, and a cell phone, all of which may have different telephone numbers.
To make communications simpler, a person may wish to be accessible through a single number. This saves the person from having to give out multiple phone numbers to friends, family and business associates, and in turns spares callers from having to guess which number to use at any given time. Moreover, this makes the person more easily accessible. The person may choose, for example, to have calls that would normally be directed to his office telephone, to be routed instead to his cell phone when he is travelling, or routed to each of several extensions where he might be reached. He can then be easily contacted, even when out of town.
In an enterprise setting, a related problem may exist when multiple switches may be put in place. A user may have an extension assigned to a first switch. When a second switch is added, perhaps having new or different technological capabilities, the second switch may need to know of the existence of the first switch (and vice versa). Moreover, the second switch may need to know how to route incoming communications to the user's extension.
In either scenario, call control devices such as switches need to share routing information. Currently, the sharing of routing information may be achieved by modification to one or more of the call control devices. Static configuration or reconfiguration of a private branch exchange (PBX) may be performed, for example.
Unfortunately, this configuration process may be cumbersome and error prone. One or more PBXs may have to be configured and reconfigured, if routing needs to change over time. Reliable and timely routing may therefore become problematic, given current technology.
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